1 in 3 Links Submitted To Reddit Go To Imgur Or YouTube

If you’ve been on Reddit, you may have noticed that many link submissions go to “imgur.com”. Imgur, an image hosting service that launched on Reddit a few years ago and has seen outstanding growth ever since, even surpassing Reddit itself.

But how many of Reddit’s many, many links are actually links to Imgur? As it turns out, Imgur, along with YouTube, account for 32% of the links submitted to Reddit.

Using Reddit’s API, I have downloaded about 5 million link submissions from Reddit, accounting for nearly two months of activity from July 22nd to September 26th. I complied a list of the most-frequent link destination domains for the links submitted anywhere on Reddit. The results were interesting.

The imgur domains (i.imgur.com and imgur.com) account for 23.7% of all links submitted to Reddit, and the YouTube domains (youtube.com and youtu.be) account for 8.2% of all links.

Two websites account for 32% of all links submitted to Reddit (i.e. 1 in every 3 submitted links go to Imgur or YouTube), and no other website is remotely close. Not the meme sites, not the music sites, not the news sites, not the porn sites: Reddit is images and video.

But where on Reddit are the Imgur and YouTube links most prominent?

Here’s a chart of the top subreddits, by percentage of all Imgur links submitted on Reddit:

It’s interesting to note how the funny subreddit has more Imgur links than the pics subreddit.

For YouTube, and the percentage of all YouTube links submitted on Reddit by subreddit:

Videos wins as you might expect, but Music is in second place. Along with listentothis,
Metal, and hiphopheads, YouTube is the de facto website for music as well as video. Gaming is also very popular with YouTube links, with gaming, leagueoflegends, and Minecraft.

Images and video are the backbone of Reddit, and both Imgur and YouTube are the primary sources. Although, there appears to be a nontrivial demand for pure music websites such as SoundCloud and gaming video websites such as Twitch.tv …could there be another big success story in the making?

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